My Invention Changes The Online Mortgage Business

So I told my client, “Let me see if I can generate leads for you. Maybe I can come up with a new capture system, something totally innovative, then drive pay-per-click and other types of media to it. Would you be interested?”

He said, “Sure, you can take a crack at it. Who are you again?” He was pretty skeptical of me. He was dealing with Ameriquest and other well-known vendors. I wasn’t in that category. (By the way, a footnote: I hate the mortgage industry. It’s sure not something I’d want to do long-term.) But he said, “Go for it.” So I went to a high-end creative marketing company that did creatives for large corporations.

We paid a pretty penny for the design work, and I put together the concept for our new lead capture system. I made a list of what I wanted it to do, what fields we wanted data capture for.

It ended up being a unique approach to lead capture, different from anything else out there. We’ve all seen mortgage sites. They give you similar direct marketing to start with, like “Isn’t the security of your family worth it?” or some other psychological direct marketing copy on the front of it. And then a lead-capture system on the back, filling out certain fields.

Personally, I didn’t want to spend 30 minutes filling out the information they asked for. Some of them asked for different fields of information. That’s how the lead business works – different leads pay different amounts, depending on what you’re able to capture.

I ended up with a unique online mortgage squeeze-page lead capture system. The site itself looked like a Pepsi machine. Bright and shiny, fun for the user to play with. Big buttons you could push. It looked like a vending machine. The fields already had pre-filled information. Most of the other mortgage lead-capture forms used drop-down menus with a list of all the different ranges. You’d fill out each one.

Mine was the same, but the difference was, once I captured the information, they were automatically forwarded to another form that pre-filled the responses they had just entered. So it was a pre-calculation system.

I had talked to many people in the mortgage industry and looked at all their lead-capture pages, so I knew what kinds of information we needed. I asked the experts, “Is it possible to pre-qualify people? What are the legal stipulations?” So we came up with a really cool system. It was kind of like a mortgage calculator, but the difference was, it was built into the lead-capture system. We pre-qualified you for a loan, based on the answers you gave us.

What they’d see was something like, “Based on what you’ve told us, you qualify for a loan of …” then we had to put little disclaimers on the bottom. (A LOT of legal problems in that industry!) So the user ended up with a pre-qual form which they could submit to a lender of their choice. We’d give them the choice of a random mortgage house in their state or some of the vendors we suggested. And they would immediately get a phone call from the lender, or they could specify when they wanted to be called on it.

It was a neat integrated system, done in a way that was very enticing for the user. It worked because I talked to so many people about what they liked about the capture systems and what they didn’t like. We also threw in a bit of personalization, so that when they selected their lender, the form would populate the lender information to say, “Mr. Smith, Ajax Mortgage will be calling you by 7pm Wednesday.” It was more of a warm lead. They were more pre-qualified than the other systems around at that time.

That’s 4 years ago, which is a lifetime in the internet industry. So today, a lot of systems have caught up with that model. Back then, it was the first of its kind. I was happy about that, but it sure didn’t make me rich. Not even close.

My Life As An Affiliate Marketer

Another important lesson I learned was, don’t do business without a business contract. If you want to do joint ventures or the selling of a specific product, that’s one thing. But don’t actually start to build a separate business with somebody without having a contract in place.

I learned that not just with the stranger I tried to build a business with back then, but also with some of my best friends. It’s an important marketing lesson. Everybody knows it, but still, lots of people don’t bother with that business contract.

From there, I went into capturing leads for different affiliate offers. I got sick of the mortgage industry. The deal fell through as I was left holding air and my partner went on to use my lead system successfully. So I figured I’d take my knowledge and experience and do some affiliate marketing.

So I sold web hosting, as an affiliate. I found deals with different hosting companies where they paid you $100 or more per sale. What I figured out was, we could sell hosting and then offer services on the back end. Running their DNS server, providing articles & other content, and so forth. We had a good response.

We didn’t market through pay-per-click or any paid channels. We just posted all over on a bunch of different forums, and we did quite well. There were a few months we made $6,000 per month. We weren’t getting rich, but we were doing OK. I was able to survive on that.

That is the first thing people need to realize. They can make a living doing this. They need a system that already works. I was trying to create things on my own. I had learned some stuff, but I didn’t really use the stuff that was right there in front of me enough. It would have been a lot easier for me to just go to Clickbank and market something as an affiliate, and I probably would have done a lot better, as far as money.

To be continued…

Internet Marketing Success Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

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It started with network marketing back in the 90s. I jumped around to a bunch of different opportunities. I had some success, but didn’t really commit enough to any one of them. I really loved the model of network marketing. It seemed like a Utopian system for people who didn’t want to operate in the corporate world anymore. MLM had the possibility of being a paradigm-shifter all over the world for a lot of people.

So I believed in the model but like so many people, I didn’t believe in myself enough that I could really do it. That seems to be a big problem. People just don’t put enough energy into their business to make it really work, whether it’s network marketing or internet marketing. They don’t believe they can actually be successful.

So they’re stuck in this corporate construct trap. They figure it’s just easier to work for somebody else. There’s nothing wrong with that. But for those of us who have the entrepreneurial spirit and want to take back control of our lives, we’re looking for a different way.

I Couldn’t Do What The Gurus Told Me

I started down that path in the 1990s. In 1999 or 2000, after Google came online, I started paying attention to all these internet marketers. I liked that model more than network marketing, because I didn’t have to do as much legwork. I could just stay home and work on it.

So I began to study the handful of successful internet marketers at that time. I was following the same guys everybody else was following back then. I saw that what they were saying was do-able, but I kept hitting the same roadblock.

I understood what they told me to do, but I couldn’t do it! There were a couple reasons that happened to me, and why it seems to happen to everybody who wants to get into internet marketing. First, there’s a technological barrier. If you don’t know how to do web design, if you don’t understand programming, then you’re at a disadvantage. You’re stuck. You either have money to hire somebody to do that for you, or you begin on your own journey of learning how to do it all.

People think internet marketing is the same as “brick and mortar” business. It is, in a lot of ways, but the real difference I saw was, it’s not as easy. It’s actually quite a bit harder. First of all off-line your business can succeed purely by the location of your building. You have a demographically targeted market in a specific location. Your competition is easily definable. Online your competition is the whole world so you have to find a niche and ways to bring internet surfers to your business site.

To market on the internet, you have to be an expert in multiple areas, in multiple fields. Just to market online, you must be able to program. You have to design and create a lead capture page. You have to learn how to run different tools. Anybody can learn to use an auto responder, but there is time involved, a learning curve.

You have to become a good copywriter. You need to learn a lot about direct marketing, how it works. So it’s interdisciplinary. It’s quite overwhelming, even for someone like myself who understood all the concepts.

People Trust You When They Know Who You Are

Over time, it began making more sense. I had observed for about 2 years by 2001, but had never taken the plunge to get active in internet marketing. I joined a couple deals I saw on TV infomercials. I got some experience and laid a groundwork to learn more.

In 2001, I was working for a small IT company here in Denver, a 4 or 5-man shop. The owner put me in charge of creating new business for the company. So I started looking at anything and everything as a means to generate leads.

I began focusing on pay-per-click and mailing off-line postcards, buying leads, pay-per-view to our crummy website that we built way back then. I did a lot of different stuff. Then I started working on how to generate clients for a business. I was horrible at it at first. Had no clue what I was doing. But by going through it, I began to understand the different things that had to be in place in order to actually capture a lead … creating a squeeze page, and so forth. So I began to generate some new customers for our business that way.

What I found effective was pushing off-line leads to online. I’d send out postcards to people to get them to our website. What internet marketers weren’t teaching back then, and which I found effective, was to be transparent with people, to be real. Let them see who you are, what your background is, what your company represents, and so forth.

I didn’t understand at the time why it was working, but looking back, it’s simple. People will trust you when they know who you are. And back in 2001 and 2002, you had the biggest scam artists in the world online. Everybody was anonymous, with private domains. People were putting fake pictures on their website. The landscape has evolved rapidly over the last 7 years. Today, people realize that transparency is very important. Even corporations are becoming more accessible.

My Own Company And Some New Lessons

Anyway, I left this IT company after a couple years and opened up my own mortgage company in 2004. I did that for 2 years. At the same time, I was dabbling in affiliate marketing, selling satellite TV systems online as an affiliate, through paid banner ads and through networks like Zango.

I had some success, but I didn’t have enough money to really push it that far. What happened was, whenever I made $1000, I spent it. That is a tough thing. When you actually get to the point where you’re making some money, it’s very easy to think, “Oh, I’ve made money now, I can make more!”

Well … fact is, you need to invest back into your company and wait until the nest egg grows. It’s the same with lead generation or anything you’ll need to be out of pocket for your business. You can’t ever really look at your profits as 100% profits.

You have to set a goal of a certain return on investment number. Then, and only then, can you take some out for yourself and pay yourself. You still have to re-invest the rest of it. Back to the story. My friend was a mortgage loan officer and owned the company with me. He taught me everything about the loan business and I started figuring how to capture leads in such a competitive business. That niche is very difficult to generate leads in, because it’s so competitive.

I spent about a year working on it and figured out a couple very effective methods. We used a telemarketing call center. We gave them a script and the qualifying questions to ask prospects, so we’d wind up with a real, legitimate lead that you could use for your own business, or else sell it out a couple times in the lead market.

So there was very specific information you needed to capture. If people are filling out a form online, you have specific fields of information, such as:

• What is your loan-to-value amount?
• Do you have a 2nd mortgage?
• How much is your 2nd mortgage for? And more …

So I figured how to capture leads through pay-per-click and telemarketing. Those were the two primary means. Then I also got into brokering mortgage leads myself. I thought that would be a way to make good money. I aligned myself with a couple individuals who were doing quite well in brokering leads. They resold an existing supply of leads. You’d find a lead generator, buy leads from them, and then sell those leads a couple times to different mortgage houses. That part is easy to do. The difficult part is setting up a distribution and online billing system to manage it all.

My job at that point was just to find new buyers of leads. I did OK, made decent money re-brokering leads. But before long, I asked one of my clients, “Wouldn’t you really rather generate your own leads? This is such a sketchy business, trying to buy leads and actually getting quality.” And of course, THAT is the big problem when you buy leads, no matter what kind of leads, from anyone. If you don’t generate them yourself, no matter what business you are in, time and time again you will buy bad or worthless leads most of the time.

You don’t get the quality you want, and you can figure the leads have already been rummaged over by several other companies by the time you get them.

Internet Marketing Success Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog

Next Article: A Windy, Curvy Path 2

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